mp3 player woes!

Hi all.

I've got a creative zen micro, had it for about 6 months, it took me ages to choose which player to get but this seemed to be really good, the reviews all said so, customer and professional.

Anyway as soon as i got it i was disappointed with the sound quality, but i thought, could be the head phones so i wait till i got back to uni to use other peoples, my house mate has some bose ones so i tried them, stilll crap, its the tonal depth, there just isnt any.

Anyway sent it back to creative and got it back, they said it was new, well it wasnt it had all my music and exactly the same settings, but most importantly, the same problem! how do i know it wasnt new? i put a uv marker in the battery bay.

Anyway its now pissed me off so much i want rid of it. They are selling for about £100 on ebay, so i should get around that, what do you think i should replace it with, an extra £40 is all i can manage im afraid!

I only ask as there are so many players out there.

Goose

 

My Zen micro is fine, although it has been replaced twice, once for a faulty headphone socket. What bitrate mp3s do you use? You cant expect mind blowing quality with any mp3 player imo.

 

See if you can get hold of a Rio Karma or an iRiver H3x series - two fantastic players.

Me *** my H340.

 

im using anything between 128kbs to 320kbs, my rips are 320, most downloads i look for are 228 but not always there! im starting to be of that opinion to bindibadgi, its stupid though, i burn mp3s to cd using nero and they are brilliant. Maybe i should get some of those wicked sony headphones, u know, the ear bud ones.

i was looking at a 4th gen ipod, but im never sure, i know they are the market leader but are they any good?

 

It doesnt matter (well, it does) about the quality of mp3, it's the quality of DAC they use which is typically as cheap as possible to maximise profits. Listening to it on a PC, where they use better engineering and better DACs is different.
Apples are sposed to have worse audio fidelity than Creative.

 

The iPod Shuffle has the best sound quality atm of any PAP, afaik.

Also, why don't you try with decent headphones? Bose != decent, and Sony are just meh. What earbuds were you looking at? I know the EX-71's are....decent. But as Bindi said, most PAP DACs are mediocre at best. The advice Krikkit gave you is probably the best -- see if you can't get ahold of a Rio Karma. Only PAP so far to properly support gapless, ogg, flac, and it just generally wins.

*** mine

 

ogg, flac?

 

I have a iPOD and panasonic in-ear headphones, awesome quality.

And when I play it through a stereo using a scart audio cable thingy it sounds awesome.

 

i had a zen touch couple months back and the sound was phenominal on the factory ear buds. I switched to fancy dancy noise cancelling ones from sony and it only got better. Ive heard the neeons or what ever they are called form creative are decent quality too or so my friend says, he has one but i havent listened to it yet.

 

This is no longer true

All current generation iPods use the electronics (decoder and DAC) that the reviewers raved about in the iPod shuffle.

Reviewers keep declaring it the best audio quality of any personal audio player available.

 

Well, you either got a bad player or your expectations are way too high. Ive had my micro replaced once, the first suffered from the faulty headphone jack problem which is quiteb common. Creative replaced my 5gb player with a 6gb for the inconveiniance it caused me. As for the quality of the sound, its crystal clear, the Creative headphones arent the greatest, try replacing them with somthing better.

 

They werent high i just expected it to be the same as my cd's made from mp3's and it wasnt close! there just is no tonal depth to the music. I had been using my sony ones from my discman where they produced brilliant sound, now its just tiney (not tiny, im talking about sound not size). I was meaning the EX71's Adnuo

 

I dont know if your model has an equalizer on it but mine (Creative MuVo FT TX) sounded bad until I tweaked the eq a bit.

 

I got the zen sleek 20GB about 1.5 months ago and I had many problems with it. I decided to get it at first because the reviews were great and I really didn't want an iPod. So once I got it the biggest problem is that the battery lasted about 2 hours max, its supposed to last 12-16 hours. That was the only thing that really pissed me off, other than that the player was great.